The Emperor's New Socks

When as much time has been put into what some have crudely termed polishing a bit of excrescence, it really hurts the bribed hacks when they have to run interference and cover their favourite bill-paying idiot.

Case in point:

The man who released Justin's infamous blackface photos to the American press (the Canadian bribed press was too busy looking for obscure tweets) speaks out:

The source of the first public photo of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in brownface says his sole motivation in providing the image to Time was his belief the public needed to see it.

Michael Adamson says he has never been a member of a political party and did not receive any payment for providing the photograph to the American magazine.

Adamson says in a written statement that he was aware of gossip surrounding the existence of the photograph because of his position as "a past member of the (West Point Grey Academy) community."

Because of that association, he was able to provide a copy of the school yearbook to the Time reporter, Adamson says.

The revelation that Trudeau appeared publicly in blackface and brownface roiled the federal election campaign when the instances became public Sept. 19.

Adamson said he will not be making any more public comments on the issue.

Don't worry, Mr. Adamson. The bribed hacks will do all the speaking for you just as they did in hunting down the female reporter who revealed that Justin groped her.




Justin will not deny that he was born into wealth and privilege but he won't eschew it, either. If he did not have the famous name or the wealth that he did not earn, it is doubtful that he would have been vaulted into the position he now occupies.

He certainly knows how to reward those like him:

According to Statistics Canada, the highest percentage income gains are going to the top 1%, and the top 0.1%.


While the average income gain for Canadians in 2017 (after the Liberals tax changes took effect) was 2.5%, which doesn’t even keep up with real inflation, income gains for the wealthiest 1% of Canadians were 8.5%.

And for those in the top 0.1%, income gains were 17.2%.


And amazingly, for the richest 0.01% of Canadians, their income gains were up a whopping 27.2% in 2017 alone.

**

So having a slice of income the government doesn’t touch makes perfect sense. And makes perfect sense for everyone, because everyone has these basic needs. But the Liberals don’t agree. They promise to recognize the basic needs of everyone making up to $147,667 a year but beyond that they will claw back the increase in the BPA so that people making more than $210,371 a year only get the old $12,069 BPA, not the new $15,000 BPA everyone else will get.

So people lower down the income scale will get a higher basic allowance — to cover “their most basic needs,” remember — while people higher up will have to do with the existing allowance. Do they actually have lower basic needs? A lot of the rich people you see on the society pages do look very slim, some even dangerously slim. Maybe they get by on fewer calories than the rest of us. Maybe their basic needs really are lower.

The Liberal backgrounder isn’t very explicit about why they claw back the BPA. It only says it’s to make sure “the top one per cent don’t get any additional benefit.” Here’s where the idea of everything being a gift of the government comes in. If you shelter a dollar of a rich person’s income from tax — even for the purpose of allowing essential human expenditures — that will reduce the rich person’s taxes by a larger dollar amount than sheltering a dollar of a poorer person’s income from tax would do. Why is that? Because the rich person pays a higher rate of tax than the poor person. So sheltering even basic needs does provide a bigger tax reduction to rich people than poor people.

But if your idea is to shelter essential spending from taxation, that doesn’t matter. If justice requires that no one pay tax on the money they need to buy essentials, then justice requires that whatever taxes they’re currently paying on that tranche of income go to zero. People who are paying more taxes will obviously get a bigger “tax break” out of that. But, to repeat, justice is that taxes on that amount of income go to zero, so differential tax impacts shouldn’t be a problem. Richer people paying higher taxes on that basic amount were suffering a greater injustice. The end result we want is that nobody pay tax on it. If getting to zero requires a larger tax cut for rich people than poor people, so be it. Zero is what’s fair.

But in this age of government of the government, by the government, for the government, that’s not how things work. The BPA is not a tax sanctuary the government may not enter. Rather, it is a gift from the government. And in 2019 no gift can be tilted toward the top end of the income distribution. 

So under the Liberal proposal, people in the first three tax brackets get $15,000 clear to cover their basic needs, while people higher up get less than that or in fact nothing. Actually, some get less than nothing because their marginal rate goes up a tiny bit: for every dollar of income they earn they pay their regular taxes but now also lose a bit of this “benefit.”

As it happens, StatCan’s latest numbers on who pays how much income tax came out Tuesday. The top one per cent of taxpayers make 9.9 per cent of all income, it’s true, but they pay 21.3 per cent of all income taxes. By contrast, the bottom 50 per cent of taxpayers make just 17.8 per cent of all income and pay only 4.6 per cent of all income taxes. Get that? The one per cent pay more than a fifth of all federal income tax. The bottom half of tax-filers — half — pay under five per cent of all federal income taxes.

He also knows how to avoid blame:

Trudeau was recently interviewed by Dawna Friesen of Global News.

Friesen asked Trudeau, “You were found guilty twice of ethics Violations, what have you learned?”

Trudeau responded by saying “we have more to do.”

But Friesen wasn’t having it:

“We, or you? You keep talking we, but these ethics violations were you.”

Friesen summed it up perfectly.

Canadians didn’t wear blackface. Trudeau did.


Canadians didn’t violate ethics laws. Trudeau did.

**

A week into the Justin Trudeau blackface drama, there has been praise for the comments and conduct of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh — beginning with praise from Conservative party Leader Andrew Scheer.

Singh deserves much credit for refusing to be used “as a tool in (Trudeau’s) exoneration,” as he put it. Trudeau had asked for a meeting with Singh in order to personally apologize, but Singh saw it for what it was, a desire to set a scene in which Trudeau the apparently-mortified and latterly-enlightened would take centre stage, and Singh would be there as a prop. Singh refused that scenario, and took a private call from Trudeau instead, with the press alerted only afterwards.

Of course, if Trudeau had just wanted to apologize he could have simply called Singh without announcing to the country that he desired a public meeting in which to offer his ostentatious contrition. He could have said sorry and let Singh decide how to handle it publicly. But Trudeau did not want something done backstage; he wanted the spotlight.

I really have no idea why anyone with an iota of self-respect would put up with this. It's like having some kind of reason and dignity is beneath the average Canadian. It's bad enough that a frat-boy refused to own up to his mistakes but that people let him evade his responsibility, get mired in it and then get lectured by the likes of Justin.

Wow.

We have sunk as a nation.


Also - maybe Justin can help. After all, he wore blackface, danced around like a moron in India and can't distinguish Japanese people from Chinese people:

A Japanese comedy duo apologized after reportedly making a racist quip that tennis star Naomi Osaka, of Japanese and Haitian heritage, needed to pick up some “bleach.”

The relatively unknown female comedy pairing A Masso and their management firm released the apology on Tuesday after a skit referring to the young tennis star made news.

The pair reportedly suggested Osaka needed “bleach,” and said the 21-year-old former world No. 1 was “too sunburned,” during a live performance on Sunday.

The duo — whose members call themselves “Kano” and “Murakami” — issued an apology, saying that they had been “ignorant” and “hurtful.”

“We apologize for our failure to supervise A Masso, who made remarks that entirely lacked consideration,” their management firm, Watanabe Entertainment, added in a statement.